@Brendan … I don’t know that everyone only chooses what they are comfortable with. If that was always the case, how would anything *new* gain any traction? I’ve frequently taken on contracts where the client has determined to use a specific technology, and rather than go through the salesmanship to deter them (from say PHP to CF) … I went ahead and developed the project in the platform that they chose.

Like I said… I don’t think good software comes out of the platform / language you use. Some of these tools are better for certain things… but at the core, a good developer is going to tend towards good (perhaps comfortable?) patterns no matter what language they are using.

Really… once you have the basics down, moving from one language to another is a matter of syntax, and any *good* developer is going to have an understanding of more than just one language anyhow.

I think people still see ColdFusion as PHP’s ugly, red-headed stepchild. True or not, that’s the perception a lot of people have. There are a lot of people who insist on MySQL in situations where Postgres is superior, or PHP where Python is superior. As we all know, people choose what they are comfortable with. The problem is when they tailor those opinions into definitive statements. I’ve seen this happen as well.

I agree with you that CF can be scalable in both the volume and financial aspects. It’s possible that the scalability this person was referring to was labor oriented. It’s darn hard to find *good* CF developers. If I were to walk into a project where CF were used, that would be my primary concern. However, I’d do a little due-diligence on the subject before calling it “not scalable”.

Brendan